What a climbdown by Stephen Miller, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff. In April, the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that the Trump Administration needed to “facilitate” the release of a man, Kilmar Abrego García, from a prison in El Salvador because it had sent him there in violation of an immigration judge’s order.

The next week in the Oval Office on live television, Miller taunted the Supreme Court, gleefully distorting what it had held. A district judge, he claimed, had told the Trump Administration “to kidnap a citizen of El Salvador and fly him back here”, but the Supreme Court ruled “9-0 in our favour”.

For weeks afterward, Miller breathed fire on social media while the administration stonewalled in court. But on Friday, Abrego García showed up in Tennessee. The Trump Administration apparently decided to “kidnap” him after all to suit its changing political needs.

The White House’s compliance with the law is good news for the country if not necessarily for Abrego García, who came to the United States illegally in the early 2010s. On the day of his return, the Justice Department unsealed an indictment charging Abrego García with felonies for his alleged role in an “illegal alien smuggling operation” from 2016 to 2025. Prosecutors say he drove migrants on “more than 100 trips between Texas to Maryland and other states”.

The media cannot resist turning certain subjects into saints, and reporters have laboured to portray Abrego García as sympathetic. But this story was never about a particular migrant’s character. At stake is whether the executive branch can send people from US soil to foreign prisons and hold them there even when courts say it is illegal. For a while, it looked like the answer might be “yes”. Now it’s at least less clear.

Miller, the frontman for the White House’s political assault on judges, sent two posts on X furiously denying that Abrego García’s return — which Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi L. Noem said would never happen — is a retreat for the administration. Abrego García is “here because new evidence has resulted in a massive criminal indictment”, Miller insists, protesting too much. “He will be tried, jailed and then deported again to El Salvador.”

Maybe so. But to convict Abrego García in the United States, the executive branch has to prove he committed crimes — a non-trivial step it did not take before having him incarcerated abroad. And now that he is back under the jurisdiction of US courts, the administration will have trouble illegally deporting him a second time. Lawfully deporting him back to El Salvador would require lifting an immigration judge’s 2019 order forbidding his removal to that country.

In short, the Trump Administration was using extralegal methods to punish Abrego García. Now it seems prepared to use legal methods. That is a significant change.

The administration could have tried to lawfully deport him in the first place. But Miller has insisted on a cowboy approach to immigration enforcement, and this standoff was the result. It didn’t help Trump politically. A YouGov poll in late April showed that Americans who held an opinion on the matter wanted the administration to facilitate Abrego García’s release by a more than 2:1 margin, even as damaging information about him emerged. Polling analyst G. Elliott Morris argues that approval of Trump’s immigration policy declined as the standoff intensified.

The White House might have concluded that the frisson of defiance was not worth the political drag in the coming months and years. Hence the retreat, made more palatable by the criminal charges against Abrego García. Those charges reportedly prompted one prosecutor to resign, and the Justice Department might not have bothered bringing them against a deportee who was not a political lightning rod.

If the Justice Department can convict Abrego García, that will be a political win against liberals who tried to make the case a referendum on an innocent “Maryland father”. But whatever the outcome, the main winner from the White House’s decision to yield to the law is the judiciary.

Especially vindicated is Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr’s measured approach to the Trump Administration. The court’s “facilitate” ruling in April was a unanimous nudge. It stopped short of demanding Abrego García’s release on any specific timeline because that might interfere with the President’s foreign affairs powers in dealing with El Salvador.

But the court took note of the administration’s appalling behaviour in this case, citing it twice in a ruling against the Trump Administration in a different immigration decision. The Abrego García matter also loomed in oral arguments about nationwide injunctions. Miller’s willfulness might have made him look tough to the GOP base, but it ended up hemming in the administration politically and legally. Perhaps the President has taken note.

• Jason Willick is a Washington Post columnist focusing on law, politics and foreign policy